2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder.
I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle.
I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists.
Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released?
20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
>* NYT is now 10x as thick?*
One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now.
> Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of your life that's spent is the same. The attentional cost is equivalent even if the value someone derived from it is not.
> I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future.
Almost no one can make a living writing poetry any more. That means the hypothetically world's best poet probably doesn't exist because that requires a time investment that simply isn't available except among the idle rich. The trend is going that way for photography, music, and fiction.
In order to be truly gifted, you need a massive amount of time to hone your craft and it's very hard to find that in an economy that doesn't pay you to do that.
> Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
I agree. Hand-made stuff is good. But imagine a world where every fast food restaurant charged five cents for an entire meal. Home-cooked meals would still be superior, but how often would the average person summon the time and willpower to make them? And in that world, how good do you think the average home cook would get?
> 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
Tangentially, assuming a median length of 4:03 [0], and a bitrate of 8192 Kbps (8 Mbps for video, 192 Kbps for audio), that’s almost 5 PB per day. That is insane.
I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.
The thing is, though, people are still choosing to spend time on crap.
So as a producer of quality content, your audience has shrunk because a minute spend consuming crap is a minute not available for your thing. And as a consumer, the average total quality being consumed has likely gone down.
Doesn’t the claim in the first paragraph only make sense if you assume that content becomes irrelevant as it ages? That holds for news but not for most other media.
I have a huge Steam backlog and a Plex server stocked with (ymmv) many of the finest movies available in the form. There’s so much media there that there’s no realistic path to experiencing it all in my lifetime. That certainly has an impact on my inclination to purchase new games or movies.
I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supply now is staggering.
Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated. It's not just the graphics that ages, but also the game mechanics, UI and UX, and the general presentation of the game. I would rather play Path of Exile than Diablo 2.
>I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supply now is staggerin.
I think even these written works go through "improvements". It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects). Picking up an old book is harder than a new one if you're very familiar with a genre.
>Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated.
I don't agree with what you wrote literally (I almost exclusively play old and old-ish games, and I have fun), but:
>Path of Exile is a 2013 free-to-play action role-playing video game developed and published by Grinding Gear Games
I'm confused. Why is your example of a modern game is a game from 2013? Most people's backlog is probably shorter than 13 years, so if 13 year old games are fine then I'm not sure that contradicts OPs point.
PoE2 is still in early access, I feel it would be wrong to say that it is out until the makers claim that the product is ready to stand on its own two feet in the market
I mean, first, Diablo 2 did come out in 2000, 13 years before Path of Exile.
But also Path of Exile is maybe the game that has received the most updates and content of any game in existence (No Man's Sky looks stingy compared to Path of Exile, imo). It receives a small expansion's worth of content every ~4 months. Path of Exile in 2026 is an entirely different experience from Path of Exile in 2013.
I absolutely would not play the 2013 version today (and also am unable to because it's a live service game).
The better comparison would be Path of Exile 2, which came out last year or comes out later this year depending on your perspective on Early Access games, but it's less a 1:1 evolution of Diablo 2 and more its own thing.
I also like old games, but I grew up in the D2 era, so they hold nostalgia factor for me. There will always be games that stand out as classics, like Diablo 2 and Super Mario 64, but not many people play them who didn't already play them during their era, and even fewer people are going out of their way to play Titan Quest or Gex 64 for the first time in 2026.
Games do age, more so than books and movies, imo, because it's a younger medium and the technology keeps evolving.
As an aside, I also think entertainment industries are not saturated. I'm always hunting for recommendations that hit just the right spot, and so much is a miss for me. I'd love if there were 10 Path of Exiles to choose from, I'd play them all. (Hell, I'd be happy with just one quality Pokémon game...)
> It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects)
For starters, the use of the language. Even a book written 20-30 years ago can feel a bit off in word choice and idioms. I know many people are into that, but for others it just increases the cognitive load of reading.
The purpose of reading is to challenge your mind, literally the cognitive load. If slang from 20 years ago is preventing you from reading a book, that’s a sign of mental laziness.
I wouldn't say irrelevant but certainly less popular over time compared to when it was newer. Even with all this supply on your fingertips I bet you watch a lot more movies from the 2020s than the 1920s.
EDIT: Since people are getting specific about that last line and missing the point, how about instead it's "I bet you watch a lot more movies from the $yourFavoriteDecade than the timemachine(start = $yourFavoriteDecade, direction = "reverse", years = 40)"
Watching a movie from the 1920s requires paying some attention to follow characters and plot. Watching a movie from the 2020s is just 90-120 minutes of nonstop CGI visual stimulation.
I believe you're spot on. We now have exceptionally capable local image generation models for example. Are the masses rushing to produce a thousand fold increase in the output of any sort of generative images?
Not even in the slightest is that happening. Why not? Nobody gives a shit. Their attention time is finite. And the masses don't want to produce anything when they're not at work. Production is work. High-quality production is hard work. The latest human TikTok continues to be at least 10x more interesting to the masses than most any form of AI media. Why? It's about pleasurable passive consumption. AI video isn't there yet (3-5 years before it really matters in the realm of big media).
There's no risk on the horizon of a supply issue. The 99% do not care to spend their home time manufacturing.
I'm trying to put a wedge between quality content and slop fodder. I admit slop fodder is increasing exponentially. But quality content e.g. movies that see theatrical runs, it isn't like there is some huge increase of supply of that relatively speaking, or some huge scale up in theater capacity to show more supply.
For games, forget steam as a whole but consider maybe a single studio. It isn't like EA is moving to monthly vs yearly releases of their regular titles even though output is 10-12ish-x more in theory. It isn't like they are covering 10x as many sports in terms of games as they did previously now that they can do 10x more output with this new tooling, in theory of course. Output in terms of actual deliverables seems to be the same as it ever was.
>Fair enough, but the increase does make it a lot harder to separate signal from noise
This is true but depends where you get your information. Social media like Reddit, yeah, it's becoming just bots and bot comments and many of the humans don't even trust themselves to write longer than six words without prompting an llm. Real news sources where people put their government name to the article, less so, especially the more credible the source is.
>I suspect that what we're seeing instead of "more deliverables" we're seeing "same deliverables with less effort"
Even this I wonder to be true. What is less effort? I agree that ultimately the slow point is not the code generation. It is the bureacracy, interactions with stakeholders and collaborators, everything else that isn't getting faster of course.
Now how about the engineer. Is anyone actually working less? Like having less to do and just not working for 9/10ths the day? I don't think that is the case. The nature of software is actually that its productivity is a bit removed from business. You could be in charge of some product and there is literally endless work to be done either in features to potentially add and bugs that appear. Some more or less critical but that is the job really: infinite work. You can literally tinker forever. If anything this enables more tinkering and doing and getting caught up mucking around in the endless work slog. And of course none of this increased effort is going to move the needle on ultimately the sales job that pays the real bills of the software org, not engineering. The product can be junk if it can be spun to sell to enough people and make a very successful company, and plenty of excellent products do not sell and wither on the vine. And there is only so much market out there, only so many fish able to bite so many lines even if there is some product market fit.
True, but these aren't becoming best sellers. It's a bigger problem for Amazon than for readers in a sense, as they need to implement a good way for people to filter out these offerings so customers don't simply walk away and go back to physical bookstores (perhaps a blessing in disguise).
I'm referring to high quality content not low effort spam such as AI books flooding amazon, which was already flooded with low effort spam books and other junk product before AI.
Engineers are not the CEOs. The CEOs are gaslighting to justify another self enriching layoff. AI decisions and control sits with a handful of grifting CEOs. Engineers get no say.
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.
How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.
With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.
I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users what they need. The idea of writing down every idea and letting AI crap out the features is entirely antithetical to creating good software.
In his memoir Stephen King says not to write your ideas down since the good ones stick around anyway, and that a notebook is a way to immortalize bad ideas.
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back.
People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can.
The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc.
You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.
Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.
in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?
I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?
I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.
I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious
> For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available.
The pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.
> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.
Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.
We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).
The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.”
It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.
I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.
Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.
That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?
There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.
Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.
So your argument is what worked back when most people were illiterate and books were a luxury and audio and video recordings were non existent will also work today?
Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.
It's almost impossible to predict how much demand there will be in that scenario because the world would be a very different place if that system was the default. And with things that are relatively cheap to make, such as professionally produced YouTube videos, people may only need to chip in a few cents to provide an equivalent return to ad revenue.
Given that people are already accustomed to paying for the promise of future things existing in the form of crowdfunding, Patreon or most subscription services in general, I don't think it would as drastic of a difference as you imagine, as long as the infrastructure is there to facilitate effortless 'investing' into many small things.
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.
This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance. Since what you’re suggesting is a complete collapse of rule of law.
If IP law is the only thing preventing society from descending into anarchy, then maybe we deserve anarchy.
> If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance.
Oh wait. I’ve heard this one before. Just send in the national guard. A couple of well placed free speech donations with some winks and nods should be able to break that sort of terrorist organization.
Don't assume people are trolling. That's how we got where we are. The response to "No one could possibly be that daft..." Is "Of course they can, and they aren't going to disappear if you ignore them."
The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
Why would anyone want that model of consumption? It seems terrible. I don't want to invest in a director to make a movie I may or may not be interested in
>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?
What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.
I just wish there were an option to buy a game, like we used to. Now every mobile game seems to prefer you watch ads every 2 minutes with no option to pay to disable them.
There are even mobile ads for other games which proudly boast "no ads" and then they still have ads. Nothing has meaning anymore.
The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics.
It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example.
Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages.
I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.
As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.
I felt the television industry and gaming industries were in fact ruined by those trends. Or at least ruined in the same sense that global warming ruins our environment.
"[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Herbert A. Simon
Simon is a fantastic author that everyone alive today would to well to read. He gets misrepresented by Karp in his manifesto:
"He envisioned that by the 1980s humans would be essentially relegated to kinetic tasks, confined for the most part to labor that required movement in the physical world."
Hm, doesn't sound like Simon. Let's see Karp's notes on that source:
"He envisioned that: See Simon, New Science of Management Decision, 38 (arguing that “men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery”)."
Ok. Seems to support Karp's interpretation. But let's follow Karp's recommendation than and see the source:
"I have done some armchair analysis of what this proposition means for predictions of the occupational profile twenty years hence. I do not have time to report this analysis in detail here, but I can summarize my conclusions briefly. Technologically, as I have argued earlier, machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Economically, men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery (e.g., operating earth-moving equipment), some kinds of non programmed problem solving, and some kinds of service activities where face-to-face human interaction is of the essence. Man will be somewhat less involved in performing the day-to-day work of the organization, and somewhat more involved in maintaining the system that performs the work."
A much more nuanced and qualified take. Published in 1977, I would say that in may ways work and organizations in developed economies largely evolved like he foresaw given how the service sector came to dominate the economy and so much human effort now goes into software development, configuration and supervision instead of pushing paper with their hands into and from drawers as it was done in the 1970s.
> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.
If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.
Actual supply hasn't done anything consequential. Extreme increases in generation + publishing are not occurring in a way that impacts the typical user.
The typical TikTok user is not seeing a 10x or 100x increase in published tiktoks from the people they follow. The same goes for YouTube. Absolutely nothing of consequence has shifted, at all.
The typical Spotify user is not seeing a flood of quality music that they have to sift through. There is no actual curation problem. The AI garbage is overwhelmingly and easily being ignored by the masses. They're just shrugging and going back to listening to their favorite music, or back to listening to their favorite podcasts, and so on.
The premise of supply to infinity is nothing more than an empty (and now aged) talking point that has turned out to be false.
It'll be trivial to find the next Hendrix, easier than ever in fact. AI sucks at making interesting music (short'ish term problem), and it can't play an instrument live to save its life (substantial problem). Fans want to see Taylor Swift live more than they want to listen to her mp3s or discs by a radical margin. They want to watch Swift perform on YouTube videos, or at the Grammy's, they want to watch her in interviews. They're fans. AI can't stand on stage and do jack squat, it has zero charisma, zero stage presence. Nobody cares about AI.
Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
If you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.
Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?
Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040
I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.
Bungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
If that were true, then Bungie post-Halo would still be Bungie post-Halo, a part of Microsoft. Not Bungie post-Activision... certainly not Bungie post-Sony...
It's not all the studio head's fault in some of these situations. It was larger studios/publishers like Microsoft Studios coming in and buying them out. The consolidation of these studios is what burned them.
The point here is that mergers and acquisitions are not the underlying cause of the problem. Yes, most M&A is private equity these days, but the problem with that is private equity. Yes, as the post we’re discussing suggests, most AAA gaming is in shambles after the hAIst of the century; blaming that on mergers and acquisitions needlessly excuses the leadership of the acquiring companies from their ultimate responsibility for the shambling. Consider ustwo: they’re employee-owned, a registered B corp, and are pivoting from employees to contractors because it’s more cheaper. One of the launch workers for that game described an event in 2014 that is an much earlier, pre-AI instance of the shambling:
> I remember having a call with a business partner just before Monument Valley came out. And they couldn't get their head around it. They're like, 'Right, so it lasts two hours, it doesn't have in-app purchases, it doesn't have leaderboards, it doesn't have adverts... Well, why are you making this again?' No one could get their head around it.
That their unicorn became real is in sharp contrast to how their business leadership thought it would go, and then they launched two sequels that were no more successful than the second and third Matrix movies. We were lucky that MV escaped containment. The studio was not threatened by mergers or by AI; it was threatened by bad management, who wanted to engineer the most financial profit rather than simply shipping a good game.
Yes, Ubisoft will fuck over everyone they buy. But that’s because Ubisoft is badly managed; consider the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider trilogy, widely considered excellent and preceded by their acquisition. Yes, it’s easier to place the blame on AI. But that’s because bad management is often greedy and miserly, and AI fits those desires like a glove.
This is no defense of Ubisoft or AI fucking over everyone, and I sure do loathe them both, but consider my point about Bungie in these terms: They took their own reins and mismanaged themselves into the ground, with a merger halfway through their decade that did not noticeably alter how they mismanaged their business. Bungie spent ten years doing strange financial engineering with multiple funding sources (Sony was merely the last one), locking the color palette picker behind cosmetic transactions, selling season passes and DLC, launching an entire sequel that bombed in year one because it removed the addictive loot box mechanism, and going so far as to delete one entire half of their world-class game rather than just refactoring it.
That’s bad management, and they’re a poster child for the entire gaming industry as a result. The financial engineering I’m blaming for this collapse, for these shambling monsters we’ve created — well, some would call it profiteering, but fintech has finops and findev, just like any other tech industry, and they engineered this outcome, so I’m simply giving them the courtesy of name that they deserve.
I agree on all of that, and to add to it that the leaders of these studios that had good games were leaders because they made good games. Not because they were good at business management. They weren’t and they thought bringing in the big folks would provide that and it always turns out terrible for everyone involved.
Todd might be a sellout, but he still seems to act with a certain level of regard to the properties he helped bring up when the business was just some weird dudes. Whoever replaces him will likely be a microsoft bean counter with zero attachment.
The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform.
You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives.
In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
> Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies.
This doesn't happen anymore, it's actually relatively good at sorting bad comments to the bottom now. The current problem is it's full of wannabe LinkedIn influencers with "Building for AI agents in business in public" in their profile using LLMs to reply to everything.
Eh. They recently changed the algorithm quite a lot, and the guy who was in charge of it (Nikita Bier) made it a lot less evil when Elon wasn't looking. But now he's gone so who knows what will happen.
I find this a correct and astute observation, and I don’t think you’re getting enough credit for it. I started noticing this SV C level groupthink a few years ago too. It’s just so _weird_ how lockstep everyone is, it’s like there isn’t a single original thought amongst today’s leaders. Just copy, mimic, converge, repeat. Same ideas, same moves (layoffs of exactly 10-20%) same org structures (flattening!) same team structures (smaller teams with AI!) same same . It’s almost creepy, and if I was more of a conspiracy theorist it would be easy to believe in shadowy leadership cabals orchestrating everything.
It didn’t used to be this way - say circa 2006-2015 you had so much more diversity in the style and ideas of leadership. Eg early Dorsey, early zuck, all these other ceos at that time trying all kinds of wild and whacky ideas of how to run their companies. I’m not sure why this convergence happened, but now everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s anti-innovation, and I hate it.
> In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA
As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase.
As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
> Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance.
The overhire during ZIRP was insane though - in total it was a good nine years of zero interest rates, and between the first period (2008-2015) and the second period (2020-2022) interest rates weren't that high either. Companies battled each other hard even for people who just went through a few weeks worth of bootcamp, just to make sure the competition didn't have access to them, even if there was not much productive work that could be assigned.
And that group is where the layoffs really hit hard: people with basic training, relatively little investment both of the company into the workers and from the workers to the company and, most importantly, a skillset / allocation that just lends itself heavily to being replaced or at the very least heavily augmented by AI.
On top of that... "good financial performance" doesn't mean the balance sheets can't look even better. With C-level boni being tied to stock performance or "efficiency gains" KPIs, it's no surprise that many just look at their paycheck first, the long-term health of the company second.
> You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
I don't have much hope left for anything in the field of "knowledge work" and for most of "creative work" either. Let's be real, the wide masses don't care they're being force fed with AI slop, as long as they have some brainrot to doomscroll in the evening. The only jobs relatively secure for now IMHO are the trades and wiping the arses of dying boomers in care homes. For the former, robots lack the required dexterity and force feedback, and for the latter, maybe the Japanese are willing to accept arse-wiping robots, but I heavily doubt this will be the case in Western countries any time soon.
> Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon.
There are companies left that are actively growing and not making shovels for the AI gold diggers? Huh?
> Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
A rare few, yes. But most have given up and went for appeasement instead after the first ones got mergers disrupted or otherwise punished.
I'm not disagreeing with you exactly - there are obviously reasons for doing all those things and on the surface they may seem sensible as well. But there are also good reasons why you'd do the exact opposite and my point is that in a group of independent thinkers you'd see greater diversity of opinions and outcomes. I was a middle manager involved in some of those layoffs (on both sides!) and saw the sausage made up close. Thing is, yes it's a shitty thing to do to someone personally, but nothing of what I saw could be justified in objective terms.
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.
This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history.
I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down.
It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.
> As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control
This generalizes to the industry, not just Origin.
Corporate game dev uniquely seems to attract incompetent middle and upper management with extreme egos.
I guess because the people who scramble to the top of the pile in an industry with an endless incoming supply of naive new workers tend to be those who spend most of their time networking and sharpening their knives.
If you find this stuff interesting, you can read about the failure of the first game I worked on here [1].
I replied in the comments [2]
It says 1997, but dev started in ‘95, I joined in ‘96.
I was pretty gutted at the time, I was just 21 years old and had the big dreams of working in games. It soon becomes clear that very few titles succeed. Luckily I had a few wins on the way, but the lack of professionalism really did get tiring.
Very interesting, thanks for the read. Your comment touches on what I’m talking about- specifically the massive new challenges introduced by rapidly increasing graphical abilities of computers and the demand from consumers to see that in all new titles.
Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues.
We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.
> I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business
I did tech consulting early in my career, so got to see a large number of companies as I was working for them. Some good, some bad.
There were a few reliable characteristics about the good ones though:
- Distilled corporate culture into learnable points, ensured everyone learned those, and then reliably used and referenced them in the context of everyday business decisions
- Centralized strategy, decentralized tactics. Execs cane up with strategic targets, then implementers were free to design their own solutions to deliver those
- Had an expectation of employee-initiated internal mobility (team switching) and used it as a management evaluation signal
- Had a strong internal process for recognizing when they promoted / hired a bad manager (i.e. they made sure a bad manager with a good team didn't look good)
I'm not sure about the last two, but Amazon nails the first two in spades. Bezos made it abundantly clear the company was about efficiency and scale... and fuck anything else (employees included).
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
Is that supposed to be an example of a good decision? Outside the US hybrids are quickly becoming irrelevant. The decision is looking like it will cost Toyota the crown
Worldwide outside the US BEVs are about 16% of new car sales (BEVs + PHEVs are about 25%). Hybrids are still going to be relevant worldwide for quite a while.
The peak of ICE car sales (which includes hybrids) was in 2017 and it’s been downhill since then, and it’s going to plummet from here as EV share keeps growing rapidly. Bev share is growing significantly faster than hybrid. I personally wouldn’t be betting my company on a rapidly shrinking market
I've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable.
One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash.
Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc..
So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for.
A friend said <ride sharing company> was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.
It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore.
And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.
Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.
I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.
A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.
I had the displeasure of working for a new crop of the same kind of people for web 2.0. There's something amazing about people who never build anything but come into the world sure that they can tell other people how to do it, and happy to take 90% of the money for making the sale. Takes a lotta chutzpah, in the original derogatory sense. What I learned from this industry is that there are more of them in the world than us, and far more of them than there are positions for them, so theirs is a vicious and dark dog-eat-dog reality where concepts like "act as if" and "fake it till you make it" are genuine currency, as opposed to stuff like idk working hard and shipping something.
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech).
Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.
So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.
Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.
Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.
There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.
I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better!
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere.
There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios.
Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).
Keeping a small core team local and outsourcing the bulk of workers, that's exactly what every company I know of seems to do these days. Not just in game development but generally. It's the biggest reason for layoffs today.
It's honestly disgusting that governments don't protect their citizens from this. Companies do this because it saves them money. Tax the hell out of them for every outsourced worker and this will all go away.
Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality.
What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line.
What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.
Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale.
There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor.
Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end.
We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar.
So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless.
So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.
When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind.
I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side.
As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.
Netflix disruption might be an apt metaphor, since it did severely damage the industry and reduce the quality of its output. Those Hollywood execs were right, even if they were ultimately doomed. It's another step in the Sheinification of everything. If it happens to software too, it won't be a victory for anyone except the owners of software companies.
I think people who long for pre-Netflix era are looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Distribution was terrible compared to now without a lot of choice. Anyone who thinks that time was better and the quality was higher don't actually remember it. They just remember the best of the era and TV shows they liked when they were younger.
Distribution got better for a time and then became the same old bullshit. When Netflix was the only dominant streaming service it was great. Now ever other person has their own custom streaming service and content is distributed across them. Back to the high seas for me. I don't mind paying. I mind the inconvenience. There was a brief window when Netflix was improving TV quality. But now it's almost all non-native US made originals that are cheap as fuck. They aren't all bad. My wife has a weakness for Spanish and Korean dramas for some reason. But it's all noise to me.
I honestly couldn't disagree more. With the advent of online services, the quality of both tv series and movies have massively increased. Budgets are larger the appetite is larger and grass roots non-Hollywood creators have a serious shot at disrupting the market.
I am personally no longer interested in the same shitty nostalgia rehash of previously garbage marvelslop and the same 15-20 actors on my screen and that has started to change because I have way more choice.
Sure. Who doesn't love 10 episode seasons every three years that are regularly and unceremoniously cancelled whenever the algorithm says so. I know folks in the industry absolutely love the total lack of job security...
I think that was absolutely true for a time. But now outside of Apple TV who is doing high budget quality TV? Certainly not Netflix. Best they can offer is a Korean or Spanish soap opera.
It's a huge mistake to think that indie teams would make better games if only they could balloon their projects to AAA-size.
Some of the most meaningful and engrossing gaming experiences of my life have come from 1-3 person teams, especially over the past few years. Meanwhile, the vast majority of AAA titles just feel like time-filling entertainment chow to me: fun-shaped but ultimately pointless. I would strongly argue that artistry and auterism is nearly impossible to preserve beyond a certain game size; the experience can't be focused by definition.
In any case, many of the most talented indie game devs are rejecting this technology outright.
Making things previously impossible possible? That's the business I joined.
Destroying people's livelihoods without care for the consequences while pursuing monopolies, capturing the value as rent seekers, and ultimately enshittifying entire industries?
Yeah, no, I know I didn't sign up for that, thanks.
And if you're thinking "wait that's not AI". Yes. That's precisely what these companies are trying to do.
That's honorable, but software has been used in no small way to disrupt traditional business. Uber. Doordash. Netflix. Tesla. Airbnb. Zillow. And yes, AI is coming for another round.
It's a part of the culture. You can say that isn't what you signed up for, but I find it hard to believe that you don't know it's part of the culture you're participating in, which is the "we" here.
Maybe first define "participating" and then perhaps I'll respond.
Because if this a case of "well you use a computer so you're part of the system, man" then I probably won't waste my time. Cynical fatalism usually involves moving goalposts IME.
Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales.
Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division).
The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.
The tweet is from Asha Sharma, the leader of Xbox!
> It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.
No??? You can quibble about the article, but you must've failed to read:
> The fourth quarter alone showed a sharper split. Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, fell 10 percent in the quarter. Hardware revenue dropped 13 percent over the same three months
This is further bolstered by MS's own press release:
> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division
You said "I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report"
When the report says:
> Xbox content and services revenue increased 13% (up 12% in constant currency)
In fact, there's no 11% figure anywhere in the report, so I have to assume this is what you're referring to since MS didn't break out Xbox hardware anywhere in it.
This is laughably shoddy work, please don't waste my time.
The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
I'm old enough to remember when AI meant a certain things, and games hijacked that to mean "some routines that make NPCs do things" and it's just gone from there. Gamers at the time were vocal about the "AI" not actually being AI, but they lost that battle.
The current use of AI for LLMs is a lot closer to the original intent that the "AI" in games ever was. It wasn't hijacked. It was retaken.
I think there is a skyrim mod that lets hook up an LLM to the NPCs so you can talk to them, the problem is that the rest of the game design doesn't really support that. So the novelty wears off quite quick.
There is probably some limited utility for using ML in games, lifelike multiplayer bots trained on behaviour of different types of players.
I think in most scenarios good gameplay comes from iteration which comes from tweak-ability, you see players get stuck in area x so you do a minor or major adjustment to area layout, enemy composition, or give the players more tools. If something is controlled by an LLM it becomes unpredictable and hard to reason about for both player and designer, and consequently also hard to adjust.
I think it is possible there is some role for LLM's in games, like how Left 4 Dead had an AI (this is classic AI not ML) director who would decide how to structure enemy waves and for example send a boss after a player who strays too far from the rest. But even there rules based AI is probably easier to adjust for the designer.
I did it for story events in my grand strategy game (Fall of an Empire) with a set of finetuned local models. It doesn't affect performance (for most people) since the game is bottlenecked on other things. Players seem to like it, there are some issues since the models are so small they are more prone to hallucination, and you also have to give them preset topics or they go on the same track again and again.
I haven't been able to use it for more than events since the tokens per second aren't high enough - I would like to use the models to e.g. generate actions for characters based on their history of interactions with other characters, but that ends up taking so much time that the player never gets any events.
I also did a demo of an LLM-powered NPC, I think the issue here is that you need more than just the LLM in e.g. a 3D RPG where you can actually go up and talk to the character. You can generate the text, but from there you also need to generate speech, from that you need to dynamically generate realistic facial and body animations that match up with it - this means you need 3 or 4 models chained together in a pipeline.
I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs.
Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer.
There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable.
The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.
There are enough people playing multiplayer games where this is not the case. Those are actually kind of annoying because ELO systems cause you to always loose about half the games (except if you are the top player of all the players) no matter how much better you get.
You could tune this to handicap the LLM such that the player wins 80% of the time or so and it should be more fun (except for the competitive aspect).
Thats a good point about multiplayer, I was really thinking single player only. I guess the main thrust of my point is that the reason there isn't more ML in games isn't related to performance, its that the goal of game design(single player anyway) isn't to make enemies into unbeatable gods so the usefulness of ML is somewhat limited.
I've only seen proof-of-concepts, like Vaudeville[1]. I think more work is currently done in the modding scene, for example with Mantella[2] which, "brings every NPC in Skyrim and Fallout 4 to life with AI."
Excepting strategy games, the industry's experience has been that most players won't notice clever AI.
There have been a number of games that have tried AI conversations, but you're basically trying to sell a Chat GPT prompt, and many players are aware they don't have to pay you to get a similar result on their own.
They already bifurcate in most any tech related job posting. You have the "AI/LLM" jobs that are full on llm koolaid and pretty vague about what your role in the job even entails, and then there's the "AI/ML" jobs that are just how they are calling the same old ML jobs these days. The title could be the same between the two, but its usually obvious from the post description what the job actually is.
The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up.
Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.
I’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.
I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.
Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
Why not? The code is famously convoluted and slow (see: dfhack). It's still an amazing accomplishment, but that doesn't make the code itself a challenge frontier models today aren't up to.
There is no universe in which Dwarf Fortress becomes a "cultural milestone." It's core concept and gameplay would never appeal to the mainstream.
The premise that the only thing holding it back is not using an AI seems far fetched. How much game code have you looked at? If it shipped, chances are it's a goddamn mess. People made memes about Undertale's thousand-line switch statement. But it isn't the code quality that makes a game (unless it breaks, if it works literally no one cares) but the design and intent behind it. Using an AI wouldn't result in anything as unique or as innovative as Dwarf Fortress. It would just get something forgettable and mediocre to market faster.
This seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus.
> Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
Well, that is an assumption. You have to demonstrate this claim. Right now I do not believe that claim.
> now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it's replicable at scale, or that it's even producing the same quality as the product they've actually been selling.
The article makes note about profits as high as ever, which is true for the revenues. Revenue of the industry used to grow every year until 2020, when it stalled and had been the same for the past 5 years. While revenue remains the same, the cost raises - people want more money due to inflation, benefits cost more, capital costs more etc. etc. So no, profits are not as high as ever, they had been falling steadily over the past 6 years and as the result we see all the layoffs and studio closures.
Is AI the reason? I somehow doubt that AI caused the revenue to stall in 2021. In 2021 AI could not even draw hands, least write decent code. What we had around that period was a lot of M&A in the industry. Insane capital went into buying up game studios and even publishers like Zenimax and Activision. Embracer alone acquired ~200 studios in 2019-2022. If I wanted to know why the industry is fucked up now I'd be looking there, not at the AI.
I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse.
Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else.
I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.
Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse.
And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games.
This is part of the reason why we see endless games as a service despite 90% of them failing. Teams have to do the bidding of the rich, but the rich don't know what's 'fun'.
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not.
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
Money has to do with whether you can make the game. Games are regularly funded by many non-profit options such as co-ops or grants, etc. Developers are free to make games however they want.
... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place.
We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments.
But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well.
And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores.
Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend.
This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes.
You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play.
Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this.
So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no.
Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
Not necessarily. Some of the most profitable games out there are not very fun to play, but they have their monetization strategy nailed down.
People laughed at Blizzard when it came out with the mobile game Diablo Immortal, and I've never heard it listed among Blizzard's best games, but Diablo Immortal was one of, if not the, best earners the company ever made.
The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job.
If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor?
The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
>Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.
I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
A sizable portion of the blue collar economy collapses too if the white collar portion stops having money to spend or suddenly has an influx of time to do some of the stuff the blue collar workers were doing for them like lawns, home repair, painting etc.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
The idea is to break the middle class. Blue or white collar it doesn’t matter. A politically active middle class is a danger to the designs of Silicon Valley ghouls.
"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI"
I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.
I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.
> Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
There will just be a lot more workers competing for those blue collar and service industry jobs in the future which will drive down their wages.
The issue isn’t every other CEO having access to the “make game” button, but who will buy that game when the customers have access to their own “make game” button?
Luckily for us China based companies are pushing the price down and bringing it to those who can afford a decent hardware. Which might not be everyone, but enough people to make it matter.
The day AI goes good enough to work in place of a principal engineer, and 10.000 people get fired, is the day when 10.000 new 1-person companies will appear that will make you whatever software you want at a fraction of the cost the big companies want to rent it to you.
Software is becoming a true commodity. Data, Hardware, specialised knowledge, good taste and engineering practices, and connectivity. Those might be key points that might keep people on a certain infrastructure, not just the software.
Well, people often play games not because they are the best game, but because their friends are playing it and they want to join in the experience. This seems to have more to do with marketing than game or code quality, and marketing is not exactly cheap.
I think that even back in early farming days, there were usually some guys who were good at using spears and didn't know much about farming who would go around taking part of the farmers' output. If the farmers were relatively lucky, the guys with the spears would stick around and defend the farmers from other guys with spears in a long-term arrangement of trading protection for material goods instead of just roaming around robbing farmers without giving anything back.
1. Human attention is a finite resource.
2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder.
I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle.
I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists.
Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released?
20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
>* NYT is now 10x as thick?*
One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now.
> Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x?
I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of your life that's spent is the same. The attentional cost is equivalent even if the value someone derived from it is not.
> I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future.
Almost no one can make a living writing poetry any more. That means the hypothetically world's best poet probably doesn't exist because that requires a time investment that simply isn't available except among the idle rich. The trend is going that way for photography, music, and fiction.
In order to be truly gifted, you need a massive amount of time to hone your craft and it's very hard to find that in an economy that doesn't pay you to do that.
> Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
I agree. Hand-made stuff is good. But imagine a world where every fast food restaurant charged five cents for an entire meal. Home-cooked meals would still be superior, but how often would the average person summon the time and willpower to make them? And in that world, how good do you think the average home cook would get?
> 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day.
Tangentially, assuming a median length of 4:03 [0], and a bitrate of 8192 Kbps (8 Mbps for video, 192 Kbps for audio), that’s almost 5 PB per day. That is insane.
0: https://tubestats.io/statistics/video
Hmmm that’s roughly around 5000sqf per year (of growth)
I think the parent is talking about quality stuff, and is specifically addressing that in contrast spam is increasing. It’s especially true in video games, more games then ever are released, but the amount of actually enjoyable quality game has barely increased. Last time I checked SoA models were still very lacking at game design, let alone capable of creating a finished original and fun game.
The thing is, though, people are still choosing to spend time on crap.
So as a producer of quality content, your audience has shrunk because a minute spend consuming crap is a minute not available for your thing. And as a consumer, the average total quality being consumed has likely gone down.
Doesn’t the claim in the first paragraph only make sense if you assume that content becomes irrelevant as it ages? That holds for news but not for most other media.
I have a huge Steam backlog and a Plex server stocked with (ymmv) many of the finest movies available in the form. There’s so much media there that there’s no realistic path to experiencing it all in my lifetime. That certainly has an impact on my inclination to purchase new games or movies.
I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supply now is staggering.
>I have a huge Steam backlog
Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated. It's not just the graphics that ages, but also the game mechanics, UI and UX, and the general presentation of the game. I would rather play Path of Exile than Diablo 2.
>I concede that that’s always been the case for durable written works thanks to the local library. But the scale of convenient supply now is staggerin.
I think even these written works go through "improvements". It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects). Picking up an old book is harder than a new one if you're very familiar with a genre.
>Yeah, and by the time you get to many of those games they will feel clunky and outdated.
I don't agree with what you wrote literally (I almost exclusively play old and old-ish games, and I have fun), but:
>Path of Exile is a 2013 free-to-play action role-playing video game developed and published by Grinding Gear Games
I'm confused. Why is your example of a modern game is a game from 2013? Most people's backlog is probably shorter than 13 years, so if 13 year old games are fine then I'm not sure that contradicts OPs point.
He may have meant poe2; it came out last year? Then again the remaster of d2 was fairly recent and quite playable by my standards.
PoE2 is still in early access, I feel it would be wrong to say that it is out until the makers claim that the product is ready to stand on its own two feet in the market
PoE is still getting new content 3 times per year, the dev is committed supporting both games for a long time.
The analogy works if you know the comparison.
I mean, first, Diablo 2 did come out in 2000, 13 years before Path of Exile.
But also Path of Exile is maybe the game that has received the most updates and content of any game in existence (No Man's Sky looks stingy compared to Path of Exile, imo). It receives a small expansion's worth of content every ~4 months. Path of Exile in 2026 is an entirely different experience from Path of Exile in 2013.
I absolutely would not play the 2013 version today (and also am unable to because it's a live service game).
The better comparison would be Path of Exile 2, which came out last year or comes out later this year depending on your perspective on Early Access games, but it's less a 1:1 evolution of Diablo 2 and more its own thing.
I also like old games, but I grew up in the D2 era, so they hold nostalgia factor for me. There will always be games that stand out as classics, like Diablo 2 and Super Mario 64, but not many people play them who didn't already play them during their era, and even fewer people are going out of their way to play Titan Quest or Gex 64 for the first time in 2026.
Games do age, more so than books and movies, imo, because it's a younger medium and the technology keeps evolving.
As an aside, I also think entertainment industries are not saturated. I'm always hunting for recommendations that hit just the right spot, and so much is a miss for me. I'd love if there were 10 Path of Exiles to choose from, I'd play them all. (Hell, I'd be happy with just one quality Pokémon game...)
> It's difficult to point out what is better about the more recently written stories, but somehow they are more appealing (in some aspects)
For starters, the use of the language. Even a book written 20-30 years ago can feel a bit off in word choice and idioms. I know many people are into that, but for others it just increases the cognitive load of reading.
The purpose of reading is to challenge your mind, literally the cognitive load. If slang from 20 years ago is preventing you from reading a book, that’s a sign of mental laziness.
Many/most people don't read for a mental workout.
That's also a sign of mental laziness.
I wouldn't say irrelevant but certainly less popular over time compared to when it was newer. Even with all this supply on your fingertips I bet you watch a lot more movies from the 2020s than the 1920s.
EDIT: Since people are getting specific about that last line and missing the point, how about instead it's "I bet you watch a lot more movies from the $yourFavoriteDecade than the timemachine(start = $yourFavoriteDecade, direction = "reverse", years = 40)"
Watching a movie from the 1920s requires paying some attention to follow characters and plot. Watching a movie from the 2020s is just 90-120 minutes of nonstop CGI visual stimulation.
There are plenty of good films to see that don’t depend on sfx
Ok but I watch more movies from the 2000s than from the 2020s.
The argument for new media is pure conspicuous consumptiin.
I believe you're spot on. We now have exceptionally capable local image generation models for example. Are the masses rushing to produce a thousand fold increase in the output of any sort of generative images?
Not even in the slightest is that happening. Why not? Nobody gives a shit. Their attention time is finite. And the masses don't want to produce anything when they're not at work. Production is work. High-quality production is hard work. The latest human TikTok continues to be at least 10x more interesting to the masses than most any form of AI media. Why? It's about pleasurable passive consumption. AI video isn't there yet (3-5 years before it really matters in the realm of big media).
There's no risk on the horizon of a supply issue. The 99% do not care to spend their home time manufacturing.
> I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released?
Steam is releasing 50-70ish games every single day now from what I understand. That's a crazy number.
Compared to 2016 which saw 10-15 per day
And in 2023 (pre AI?) it was 30-40ish
I'm trying to put a wedge between quality content and slop fodder. I admit slop fodder is increasing exponentially. But quality content e.g. movies that see theatrical runs, it isn't like there is some huge increase of supply of that relatively speaking, or some huge scale up in theater capacity to show more supply.
For games, forget steam as a whole but consider maybe a single studio. It isn't like EA is moving to monthly vs yearly releases of their regular titles even though output is 10-12ish-x more in theory. It isn't like they are covering 10x as many sports in terms of games as they did previously now that they can do 10x more output with this new tooling, in theory of course. Output in terms of actual deliverables seems to be the same as it ever was.
> I'm trying to put a wedge between quality content and slop fodder. I admit slop fodder is increasing exponentially
Fair enough, but the increase does make it a lot harder to separate signal from noise
> Output in terms of actual deliverables seems to be the same as it ever was.
Any efficiency that the technology is revealing seems to be getting gobbled by bureaucracy to me.
I suspect that what we're seeing instead of "more deliverables" we're seeing "same deliverables with less effort"
>Fair enough, but the increase does make it a lot harder to separate signal from noise
This is true but depends where you get your information. Social media like Reddit, yeah, it's becoming just bots and bot comments and many of the humans don't even trust themselves to write longer than six words without prompting an llm. Real news sources where people put their government name to the article, less so, especially the more credible the source is.
>I suspect that what we're seeing instead of "more deliverables" we're seeing "same deliverables with less effort"
Even this I wonder to be true. What is less effort? I agree that ultimately the slow point is not the code generation. It is the bureacracy, interactions with stakeholders and collaborators, everything else that isn't getting faster of course.
Now how about the engineer. Is anyone actually working less? Like having less to do and just not working for 9/10ths the day? I don't think that is the case. The nature of software is actually that its productivity is a bit removed from business. You could be in charge of some product and there is literally endless work to be done either in features to potentially add and bugs that appear. Some more or less critical but that is the job really: infinite work. You can literally tinker forever. If anything this enables more tinkering and doing and getting caught up mucking around in the endless work slog. And of course none of this increased effort is going to move the needle on ultimately the sales job that pays the real bills of the software org, not engineering. The product can be junk if it can be spun to sell to enough people and make a very successful company, and plenty of excellent products do not sell and wither on the vine. And there is only so much market out there, only so many fish able to bite so many lines even if there is some product market fit.
Ironically, AI may end up being helpful in filtering out slop and discovering content you like.
To debate your point, we are absolutely seeing Amazon being flooded by AI books. Any open marketplace is currently experiencing a race to the bottom.
True, but these aren't becoming best sellers. It's a bigger problem for Amazon than for readers in a sense, as they need to implement a good way for people to filter out these offerings so customers don't simply walk away and go back to physical bookstores (perhaps a blessing in disguise).
I'm referring to high quality content not low effort spam such as AI books flooding amazon, which was already flooded with low effort spam books and other junk product before AI.
Idk about 10x but I know I get my podcasts at 2x speed.
1x makes it sound like they're not on enough cocaine.
Engineers are not the CEOs. The CEOs are gaslighting to justify another self enriching layoff. AI decisions and control sits with a handful of grifting CEOs. Engineers get no say.
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.
How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away.
With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.
I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users what they need. The idea of writing down every idea and letting AI crap out the features is entirely antithetical to creating good software.
In his memoir Stephen King says not to write your ideas down since the good ones stick around anyway, and that a notebook is a way to immortalize bad ideas.
Paul McCartney maybe?
"We were writing songs that were memorable, not because we wanted them to be memorable but because we had to remember them"
Had to refresh my memory, but it was "If it ain't worth remembering, it ain't worth writing down.", from Ronnie Van Zant.
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
It's pretty clear to me that the primary value-add of AI is as an enshittification accelerator. (At least in the commercial sector.)
The primary value of AI is solving problems AI created and becoming an inefficient interfacing layer for things it made functionally obsolete.
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back.
People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can.
The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc.
You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.
If you want to get rid of patents and copyright then entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc).
Also, people only invest in things if there is an expectation of profit. Your model for raising capital does not make sense.
Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual. Before AI, it was the internet that really challenged intellectual property rights. When information flows freely, what happens? Example: many musicians make their pay by performing live, not from royalties on the properties they sold to producing companies.
Intellectual property rights rewards the first-comers, not the innovators. For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available. The same can be said about AI models: the heavy investments by OpenAI and Anthropic to make these frontier models forces them to charge pretty expensive prices, but if we only had them, we would not have much innovation in making fast tiny models that are more cost and energy efficient. That drive comes from China because they are resource constrained and price-conscious.
in engineering software land, FreeCAD exists, yet Fusion, Catia, OnShape, Creo, SolidWorks, NX, and many other paid Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Engineering softwares exist and have features and use-cases that FreeCAD simply does not have. In this scenario, how do you square taking the risk and time required to develop something good with the hopeful payoff for creating something?
I guess some of the major value in those closed softwares is enterprise support and that could still be feasible, but still, the question stands - if what is currently software piracy becomes legal, how do the people who commit a portion of their lives to improving whatever it is they're working on get compensated?
I regularly contribute to FOSS, but I am in quite a privileged position to do so, because I have time to do so after putting food on the table.
I hope this comes off in good faith, I'm genuinely curious
>For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available
Which is why there is famously no market or money to be made on generic medicine.
> For example, you give a drug researcher a patent on their discovery, that discourages innovation on making that new drug cheap and readily available.
The pharmaceutical industry is also very highly regulated and so without some protection of profit you actually are likely to end up in a situation in which innovation doesn’t occur because it costs a lot of money to build new pharmaceutical products and if you build them and someone can just reverse engineer it and sell it cheaply you’ve switched your competition model from rewarding the development, however imperfect, of new drugs to rewarding a race to the bottom on cost and increasingly thin supply chains propped up by cost-cutting measures. With more regulations you probably need stronger IP protections as well.
> Property rights are not the only way to create profit. That's a very capitalistic mindset. Plenty of societies have functioned adequately without our current form of property rights, either physical or intellectual.
Well it’s good to have a capitalistic mindset since so far that has been without a doubt the best economic model that has worked for humankind, even including the negative repercussions, but you shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to IP. It’s a bit like “free” trade - if the US was, for example, completely open with IP and China isn’t they simply take your IP, build cheaper products, and then funnel profits into IP protected drugs. It’s a lose-lose. Don’t let communists and other such authoritarians confuse you about how the world actually works.
We can also reform some IP for certain industries. When it comes to trade secrets maybe we protect those. Internet content? Who cares? It’s almost universally useless and not economically valuable so there isn’t any need to solve the problem of capturing monetary value. One of the best potential effects of AI would be that it could wipe out all of these useless content creators and pundits leaving only the good stuff left (established institutions like the NYT and truly great content creators - Khan Academy for ex).
The parent was responding to this diabolically uninformed quote from the GP: “You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like.”
It’s hard to have “invest” in a sentence without a capitalist structure unless GP somehow meant invest their personal time or barter or something.
I think they meant more like "people band together to pay Christophe Nolan to create some new film" ala crowdfunding. Is that a sustainable model for the world economy? Unclear.
Well if we got enough people together it would be pretty cheap, maybe 15 or 20 bucks or so with inflation. And we could fill the movie upfront, and create some previews and launch an advertising campaign -- that'd certainly help drum up interest and get more people to crowdfund. Best even to just collect their money as right before they watch it so they know they aren't getting scammed and will in fact get to watch the movie they are crowdfunding. We can also crowdfund some popcorn machines and communal viewing rooms, after all people will want to have a snack and watch their crowdfunded movie with friends and family.
That was a lot of snark :-) I know what you're saying. It's not clear to what degree the film industry would be viable in its current form though without IP rights. If everyone can watch the latest marvel film at home for free, are they going to be willing to pay to see it in theaters?
There would likely still be some demand for the experience, but the tickets would need to be more expensive to recoup the costs of making the film. At that point: it does seem like people pooling together their funds to fund the movie itself isn't insane. The point is that the "investors" wouldn't be investing in the hopes of a financial return, they'd be paying for the creation of the film.
> When information flows freely, what happens?
Mostly, the signal to noise ratio goes to hell.
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Namely... every society in existence before the year 1496. Our current form of property rights includes copyright, which had no formal treatment until the city of Venice issued a decree that fined anyone who printed an author's work without direct permission.
Previous to that, the effort of copying a book was seen as so high, that one deserved reward simply for doing that. In fact, there were times that copying books was seen as social charity, that needed to be encouraged.
So your argument is what worked back when most people were illiterate and books were a luxury and audio and video recordings were non existent will also work today?
I feel like you're searching for an argument when all they did was ask for a factual point, and I gave them one.
All the nuance you're trying to imply about technology and the time period being non-modern is already embedded into my comment.
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Correlation != causation
>This is some New Zealand-level of alternative facts.
Please help me grok this statement...
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> entire industries would have to roll over and die (the music industry, publishing, Disney, etc)
I'm not seeing a downside here. They are all predatory.
And this is precisely the business model that platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter facilitate.
Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.
It's almost impossible to predict how much demand there will be in that scenario because the world would be a very different place if that system was the default. And with things that are relatively cheap to make, such as professionally produced YouTube videos, people may only need to chip in a few cents to provide an equivalent return to ad revenue.
Given that people are already accustomed to paying for the promise of future things existing in the form of crowdfunding, Patreon or most subscription services in general, I don't think it would as drastic of a difference as you imagine, as long as the infrastructure is there to facilitate effortless 'investing' into many small things.
Sounds fine to me! Less inane, pointless, content? Only left with what people chose to exist? Sign me up!
Good.
Every masterpiece or visionary work, which suffered late recognition is evidence against your proposal.
If art is shaped by popular demand only, you will get nothing but the most comfortable, unchallenging, forgettable popculture fluff imaginable.
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways.
This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.
That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas?
Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.
It's not exactly an old thing. Wizards of the Coast hired the Pinkertons to seize cards and harass people extra-legally as recent at 2023. As I said, even if you remove the legal barriers preventing control over IP companies can and do operate on the fringe of or outside of the law to enforce it anyways.
If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance. Since what you’re suggesting is a complete collapse of rule of law.
If IP law is the only thing preventing society from descending into anarchy, then maybe we deserve anarchy.
> If that were to happen on a large scale, people could band together to provide security/resistance.
Oh wait. I’ve heard this one before. Just send in the national guard. A couple of well placed free speech donations with some winks and nods should be able to break that sort of terrorist organization.
If you truly believe this and aren’t just spouting off, I hope you’re either making plans to move or gearing up for the inevitable civil conflict.
Given your green account I’m sure you’re just trolling.
Don't assume people are trolling. That's how we got where we are. The response to "No one could possibly be that daft..." Is "Of course they can, and they aren't going to disappear if you ignore them."
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The Pinkerton incident involved WotC protecting a trade secret, generally the least controversial part of IP law. This was not a case of a mobbed up card vendor roughing up a competitor. People can reasonably object to the tactics used, but the distribution of materials that were never approved for release is a small fraction of piracy and one where the grey hats start to get a little darker.
Why would anyone want that model of consumption? It seems terrible. I don't want to invest in a director to make a movie I may or may not be interested in
>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone
I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it.
On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?
What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.
I just wish there were an option to buy a game, like we used to. Now every mobile game seems to prefer you watch ads every 2 minutes with no option to pay to disable them.
There are even mobile ads for other games which proudly boast "no ads" and then they still have ads. Nothing has meaning anymore.
The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics.
It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example.
Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages.
I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.
Touchscreen is a terrible ux and battery life gets drained so fast you basically have to be at a charger
As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.
I felt the television industry and gaming industries were in fact ruined by those trends. Or at least ruined in the same sense that global warming ruins our environment.
> a unit of digital media is not a commodity good.
Indeed, so there is no limit on how much of supply can simply be ignored, so 100x every year doesn't need to push anything off the rails.
And in reality there is no 0 cost, the marginal cost isn't about pushing bits in the wires
"[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Herbert A. Simon
Simon is a fantastic author that everyone alive today would to well to read. He gets misrepresented by Karp in his manifesto:
"He envisioned that by the 1980s humans would be essentially relegated to kinetic tasks, confined for the most part to labor that required movement in the physical world."
Hm, doesn't sound like Simon. Let's see Karp's notes on that source:
"He envisioned that: See Simon, New Science of Management Decision, 38 (arguing that “men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery”)."
Ok. Seems to support Karp's interpretation. But let's follow Karp's recommendation than and see the source:
"I have done some armchair analysis of what this proposition means for predictions of the occupational profile twenty years hence. I do not have time to report this analysis in detail here, but I can summarize my conclusions briefly. Technologically, as I have argued earlier, machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Economically, men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery (e.g., operating earth-moving equipment), some kinds of non programmed problem solving, and some kinds of service activities where face-to-face human interaction is of the essence. Man will be somewhat less involved in performing the day-to-day work of the organization, and somewhat more involved in maintaining the system that performs the work."
A much more nuanced and qualified take. Published in 1977, I would say that in may ways work and organizations in developed economies largely evolved like he foresaw given how the service sector came to dominate the economy and so much human effort now goes into software development, configuration and supervision instead of pushing paper with their hands into and from drawers as it was done in the 1970s.
The article starts by video companies being as profitable as ever. Issue is not with economics not being there.
> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube.
If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
metal gear solid 2 predicted all of this 25 years ago
And Kojima's predictions in MGS2 were based on writings by Richard Dawkins in the 70s
Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.
Actual supply hasn't done anything consequential. Extreme increases in generation + publishing are not occurring in a way that impacts the typical user.
The typical TikTok user is not seeing a 10x or 100x increase in published tiktoks from the people they follow. The same goes for YouTube. Absolutely nothing of consequence has shifted, at all.
The typical Spotify user is not seeing a flood of quality music that they have to sift through. There is no actual curation problem. The AI garbage is overwhelmingly and easily being ignored by the masses. They're just shrugging and going back to listening to their favorite music, or back to listening to their favorite podcasts, and so on.
The premise of supply to infinity is nothing more than an empty (and now aged) talking point that has turned out to be false.
It'll be trivial to find the next Hendrix, easier than ever in fact. AI sucks at making interesting music (short'ish term problem), and it can't play an instrument live to save its life (substantial problem). Fans want to see Taylor Swift live more than they want to listen to her mp3s or discs by a radical margin. They want to watch Swift perform on YouTube videos, or at the Grammy's, they want to watch her in interviews. They're fans. AI can't stand on stage and do jack squat, it has zero charisma, zero stage presence. Nobody cares about AI.
"art"
Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
If you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.
LOL no it won't because mom and pop won't be able to afford to run a business and no one would be able to afford to buy from them either.
Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?
Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040
I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.
Ubisoft, Bungie, id software…
Blizzard
MBA syndrome. People who allegedly know "business" but know fuck all about the domains they frequently ruin.
Bungie, in its post-Halo standalone incarnation, was running a microtransactions empire from day one and funded itself on the debt owed by those; it was not ‘taken over’ by financial engineers, so to speak, because the call was coming from inside the house from day one. They executed on some very nice tricks to get funded but their business was operated consistently (impeccable scenic and gunplay, variable-quality story and voicing, catastrophically-bad management) throughout.
The others are all well-known acquisitions or acquirers, but I’m not seeing a clear link to my point. Certainly they’re stellar examples of ‘greed minmaxers’ but not so much of ‘profitable incompetence through financial engineer takeover’ like happened to, say, Toys R Us or Wizards of the Coast. Perhaps you could explain in more detail?
If that were true, then Bungie post-Halo would still be Bungie post-Halo, a part of Microsoft. Not Bungie post-Activision... certainly not Bungie post-Sony...
It's not all the studio head's fault in some of these situations. It was larger studios/publishers like Microsoft Studios coming in and buying them out. The consolidation of these studios is what burned them.
The point here is that mergers and acquisitions are not the underlying cause of the problem. Yes, most M&A is private equity these days, but the problem with that is private equity. Yes, as the post we’re discussing suggests, most AAA gaming is in shambles after the hAIst of the century; blaming that on mergers and acquisitions needlessly excuses the leadership of the acquiring companies from their ultimate responsibility for the shambling. Consider ustwo: they’re employee-owned, a registered B corp, and are pivoting from employees to contractors because it’s more cheaper. One of the launch workers for that game described an event in 2014 that is an much earlier, pre-AI instance of the shambling:
> I remember having a call with a business partner just before Monument Valley came out. And they couldn't get their head around it. They're like, 'Right, so it lasts two hours, it doesn't have in-app purchases, it doesn't have leaderboards, it doesn't have adverts... Well, why are you making this again?' No one could get their head around it.
That their unicorn became real is in sharp contrast to how their business leadership thought it would go, and then they launched two sequels that were no more successful than the second and third Matrix movies. We were lucky that MV escaped containment. The studio was not threatened by mergers or by AI; it was threatened by bad management, who wanted to engineer the most financial profit rather than simply shipping a good game.
Yes, Ubisoft will fuck over everyone they buy. But that’s because Ubisoft is badly managed; consider the Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider trilogy, widely considered excellent and preceded by their acquisition. Yes, it’s easier to place the blame on AI. But that’s because bad management is often greedy and miserly, and AI fits those desires like a glove.
This is no defense of Ubisoft or AI fucking over everyone, and I sure do loathe them both, but consider my point about Bungie in these terms: They took their own reins and mismanaged themselves into the ground, with a merger halfway through their decade that did not noticeably alter how they mismanaged their business. Bungie spent ten years doing strange financial engineering with multiple funding sources (Sony was merely the last one), locking the color palette picker behind cosmetic transactions, selling season passes and DLC, launching an entire sequel that bombed in year one because it removed the addictive loot box mechanism, and going so far as to delete one entire half of their world-class game rather than just refactoring it.
That’s bad management, and they’re a poster child for the entire gaming industry as a result. The financial engineering I’m blaming for this collapse, for these shambling monsters we’ve created — well, some would call it profiteering, but fintech has finops and findev, just like any other tech industry, and they engineered this outcome, so I’m simply giving them the courtesy of name that they deserve.
I agree on all of that, and to add to it that the leaders of these studios that had good games were leaders because they made good games. Not because they were good at business management. They weren’t and they thought bringing in the big folks would provide that and it always turns out terrible for everyone involved.
Todd Howard gets a lot of flak from the bethesda fanbase, but I reckon whoever replaces Todd Howard is guaranteed to be worse.
I don't know that we want to resort to comparing which sellout is worse.
They’re all bad bosses, Brant.
Todd might be a sellout, but he still seems to act with a certain level of regard to the properties he helped bring up when the business was just some weird dudes. Whoever replaces him will likely be a microsoft bean counter with zero attachment.
I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...
The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform.
You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives.
In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
> Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies.
This doesn't happen anymore, it's actually relatively good at sorting bad comments to the bottom now. The current problem is it's full of wannabe LinkedIn influencers with "Building for AI agents in business in public" in their profile using LLMs to reply to everything.
Twitter only shows you what you want to see
Eh. They recently changed the algorithm quite a lot, and the guy who was in charge of it (Nikita Bier) made it a lot less evil when Elon wasn't looking. But now he's gone so who knows what will happen.
I find this a correct and astute observation, and I don’t think you’re getting enough credit for it. I started noticing this SV C level groupthink a few years ago too. It’s just so _weird_ how lockstep everyone is, it’s like there isn’t a single original thought amongst today’s leaders. Just copy, mimic, converge, repeat. Same ideas, same moves (layoffs of exactly 10-20%) same org structures (flattening!) same team structures (smaller teams with AI!) same same . It’s almost creepy, and if I was more of a conspiracy theorist it would be easy to believe in shadowy leadership cabals orchestrating everything.
It didn’t used to be this way - say circa 2006-2015 you had so much more diversity in the style and ideas of leadership. Eg early Dorsey, early zuck, all these other ceos at that time trying all kinds of wild and whacky ideas of how to run their companies. I’m not sure why this convergence happened, but now everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s anti-innovation, and I hate it.
> In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA
As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase.
As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
> Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance.
The overhire during ZIRP was insane though - in total it was a good nine years of zero interest rates, and between the first period (2008-2015) and the second period (2020-2022) interest rates weren't that high either. Companies battled each other hard even for people who just went through a few weeks worth of bootcamp, just to make sure the competition didn't have access to them, even if there was not much productive work that could be assigned.
And that group is where the layoffs really hit hard: people with basic training, relatively little investment both of the company into the workers and from the workers to the company and, most importantly, a skillset / allocation that just lends itself heavily to being replaced or at the very least heavily augmented by AI.
On top of that... "good financial performance" doesn't mean the balance sheets can't look even better. With C-level boni being tied to stock performance or "efficiency gains" KPIs, it's no surprise that many just look at their paycheck first, the long-term health of the company second.
> You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
I don't have much hope left for anything in the field of "knowledge work" and for most of "creative work" either. Let's be real, the wide masses don't care they're being force fed with AI slop, as long as they have some brainrot to doomscroll in the evening. The only jobs relatively secure for now IMHO are the trades and wiping the arses of dying boomers in care homes. For the former, robots lack the required dexterity and force feedback, and for the latter, maybe the Japanese are willing to accept arse-wiping robots, but I heavily doubt this will be the case in Western countries any time soon.
> Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon.
There are companies left that are actively growing and not making shovels for the AI gold diggers? Huh?
> Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
A rare few, yes. But most have given up and went for appeasement instead after the first ones got mergers disrupted or otherwise punished.
I'm not disagreeing with you exactly - there are obviously reasons for doing all those things and on the surface they may seem sensible as well. But there are also good reasons why you'd do the exact opposite and my point is that in a group of independent thinkers you'd see greater diversity of opinions and outcomes. I was a middle manager involved in some of those layoffs (on both sides!) and saw the sausage made up close. Thing is, yes it's a shitty thing to do to someone personally, but nothing of what I saw could be justified in objective terms.
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And thus microservices were spread across the unsuspecting world.
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.
Happy days :D
This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history.
I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down.
It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.
> As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control
This generalizes to the industry, not just Origin.
Corporate game dev uniquely seems to attract incompetent middle and upper management with extreme egos.
I guess because the people who scramble to the top of the pile in an industry with an endless incoming supply of naive new workers tend to be those who spend most of their time networking and sharpening their knives.
If you find this stuff interesting, you can read about the failure of the first game I worked on here [1].
I replied in the comments [2]
It says 1997, but dev started in ‘95, I joined in ‘96.
I was pretty gutted at the time, I was just 21 years old and had the big dreams of working in games. It soon becomes clear that very few titles succeed. Luckily I had a few wins on the way, but the lack of professionalism really did get tiring.
[1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...
[2] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...
Very interesting, thanks for the read. Your comment touches on what I’m talking about- specifically the massive new challenges introduced by rapidly increasing graphical abilities of computers and the demand from consumers to see that in all new titles.
Have you seen Halt and Catch Fire? It's really, really good television and may be your kinda thing thematically. Excellent soundtrack too.
Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues.
We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.
> I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business
I did tech consulting early in my career, so got to see a large number of companies as I was working for them. Some good, some bad.
There were a few reliable characteristics about the good ones though:
Amazon?
I'm not sure about the last two, but Amazon nails the first two in spades. Bezos made it abundantly clear the company was about efficiency and scale... and fuck anything else (employees included).
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
Toyota is (was?), all by their lonesome selves, almost 100% bet-the-farm on hydrogen vehicles instead of electric.
Is that supposed to be an example of a good decision? Outside the US hybrids are quickly becoming irrelevant. The decision is looking like it will cost Toyota the crown
Worldwide outside the US BEVs are about 16% of new car sales (BEVs + PHEVs are about 25%). Hybrids are still going to be relevant worldwide for quite a while.
The peak of ICE car sales (which includes hybrids) was in 2017 and it’s been downhill since then, and it’s going to plummet from here as EV share keeps growing rapidly. Bev share is growing significantly faster than hybrid. I personally wouldn’t be betting my company on a rapidly shrinking market
Toyota made un-Toyota like mistakes on the new v6 twin turbo. They are not immune anymore.
Uhm, seems to me the companies that are spearheading the rollout of electric vehicles will be still existing in the future.
BYD will dominate, not GM.
I've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable.
One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash.
Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc..
So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for.
A friend said <ride sharing company> was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.
It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore.
And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.
Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.
I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.
A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.
I had the displeasure of working for a new crop of the same kind of people for web 2.0. There's something amazing about people who never build anything but come into the world sure that they can tell other people how to do it, and happy to take 90% of the money for making the sale. Takes a lotta chutzpah, in the original derogatory sense. What I learned from this industry is that there are more of them in the world than us, and far more of them than there are positions for them, so theirs is a vicious and dark dog-eat-dog reality where concepts like "act as if" and "fake it till you make it" are genuine currency, as opposed to stuff like idk working hard and shipping something.
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech).
Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
Were they ever well run?
In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.
So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.
Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.
Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.
There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.
It's not a new phenomenon. Companies have been dying for as long as companies have existed
I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better!
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere.
There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios.
Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).
Keeping a small core team local and outsourcing the bulk of workers, that's exactly what every company I know of seems to do these days. Not just in game development but generally. It's the biggest reason for layoffs today.
It's honestly disgusting that governments don't protect their citizens from this. Companies do this because it saves them money. Tax the hell out of them for every outsourced worker and this will all go away.
Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality.
What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line.
What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.
Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale.
There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor.
Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end.
We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar.
So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless.
So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.
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> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
They've never been well-ran, but the laws of physics and economics put hard limits on the amount of stupid bullshit that they could produce.
Now that those limits have been largely removed, an exec at the head of a company in the post-AI age is a chimp with a machinegun.
Anything they ask for can and will be built.
When we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind.
I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side.
As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.
Netflix disruption might be an apt metaphor, since it did severely damage the industry and reduce the quality of its output. Those Hollywood execs were right, even if they were ultimately doomed. It's another step in the Sheinification of everything. If it happens to software too, it won't be a victory for anyone except the owners of software companies.
I think people who long for pre-Netflix era are looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Distribution was terrible compared to now without a lot of choice. Anyone who thinks that time was better and the quality was higher don't actually remember it. They just remember the best of the era and TV shows they liked when they were younger.
Distribution got better for a time and then became the same old bullshit. When Netflix was the only dominant streaming service it was great. Now ever other person has their own custom streaming service and content is distributed across them. Back to the high seas for me. I don't mind paying. I mind the inconvenience. There was a brief window when Netflix was improving TV quality. But now it's almost all non-native US made originals that are cheap as fuck. They aren't all bad. My wife has a weakness for Spanish and Korean dramas for some reason. But it's all noise to me.
I honestly couldn't disagree more. With the advent of online services, the quality of both tv series and movies have massively increased. Budgets are larger the appetite is larger and grass roots non-Hollywood creators have a serious shot at disrupting the market.
I am personally no longer interested in the same shitty nostalgia rehash of previously garbage marvelslop and the same 15-20 actors on my screen and that has started to change because I have way more choice.
Sure. Who doesn't love 10 episode seasons every three years that are regularly and unceremoniously cancelled whenever the algorithm says so. I know folks in the industry absolutely love the total lack of job security...
I think that was absolutely true for a time. But now outside of Apple TV who is doing high budget quality TV? Certainly not Netflix. Best they can offer is a Korean or Spanish soap opera.
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It's a huge mistake to think that indie teams would make better games if only they could balloon their projects to AAA-size.
Some of the most meaningful and engrossing gaming experiences of my life have come from 1-3 person teams, especially over the past few years. Meanwhile, the vast majority of AAA titles just feel like time-filling entertainment chow to me: fun-shaped but ultimately pointless. I would strongly argue that artistry and auterism is nearly impossible to preserve beyond a certain game size; the experience can't be focused by definition.
In any case, many of the most talented indie game devs are rejecting this technology outright.
Which games we're those?
Recently Silksong, Celeste, Rhythm Doctor, Star of Providence, Spelunky 2, then classics like Fez, Cave Story, La Mulana, and many more...
Who's we? You're certainly not speaking for me.
Making things previously impossible possible? That's the business I joined.
Destroying people's livelihoods without care for the consequences while pursuing monopolies, capturing the value as rent seekers, and ultimately enshittifying entire industries?
Yeah, no, I know I didn't sign up for that, thanks.
And if you're thinking "wait that's not AI". Yes. That's precisely what these companies are trying to do.
That's honorable, but software has been used in no small way to disrupt traditional business. Uber. Doordash. Netflix. Tesla. Airbnb. Zillow. And yes, AI is coming for another round.
It's a part of the culture. You can say that isn't what you signed up for, but I find it hard to believe that you don't know it's part of the culture you're participating in, which is the "we" here.
Maybe first define "participating" and then perhaps I'll respond.
Because if this a case of "well you use a computer so you're part of the system, man" then I probably won't waste my time. Cynical fatalism usually involves moving goalposts IME.
In the first paragraph:
> While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper
And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says:
> It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right
Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY.
Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.
Are there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4...
edit: Tarn Adams is also an indie game developer, not a game journalist. Dwarf Fortress is highly influential in the indie game scene.
You can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f...
Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division).
The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.
An article that references a tweet and some blog site called "beincrypto.com". That's not the first result for me, and I'm glad it isn't.
It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.
edit:
> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division
This is also false
The tweet is from Asha Sharma, the leader of Xbox!
> It's also only referencing hardware sales. Not the Xbox division.
No??? You can quibble about the article, but you must've failed to read:
> The fourth quarter alone showed a sharper split. Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, fell 10 percent in the quarter. Hardware revenue dropped 13 percent over the same three months
This is further bolstered by MS's own press release:
> XBOX content and services revenue decreased 10%
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2026-q4...
> and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division
You said "I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report"
When the report says:
> Xbox content and services revenue increased 13% (up 12% in constant currency)
In fact, there's no 11% figure anywhere in the report, so I have to assume this is what you're referring to since MS didn't break out Xbox hardware anywhere in it.
This is laughably shoddy work, please don't waste my time.
Revenues overall are rising, but the only real growth right now is in China + East Asia, and in Roblox.
https://www.matthewball.co/all/presentation-the-state-of-vid...
The video game revenue growth is mostly mobile game and gacha game mtx, primarily in the Asian markets.
The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
I'm old enough to remember when AI meant a certain things, and games hijacked that to mean "some routines that make NPCs do things" and it's just gone from there. Gamers at the time were vocal about the "AI" not actually being AI, but they lost that battle.
The current use of AI for LLMs is a lot closer to the original intent that the "AI" in games ever was. It wasn't hijacked. It was retaken.
Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.
I think there is a skyrim mod that lets hook up an LLM to the NPCs so you can talk to them, the problem is that the rest of the game design doesn't really support that. So the novelty wears off quite quick.
There is probably some limited utility for using ML in games, lifelike multiplayer bots trained on behaviour of different types of players.
I think in most scenarios good gameplay comes from iteration which comes from tweak-ability, you see players get stuck in area x so you do a minor or major adjustment to area layout, enemy composition, or give the players more tools. If something is controlled by an LLM it becomes unpredictable and hard to reason about for both player and designer, and consequently also hard to adjust.
I think it is possible there is some role for LLM's in games, like how Left 4 Dead had an AI (this is classic AI not ML) director who would decide how to structure enemy waves and for example send a boss after a player who strays too far from the rest. But even there rules based AI is probably easier to adjust for the designer.
I did it for story events in my grand strategy game (Fall of an Empire) with a set of finetuned local models. It doesn't affect performance (for most people) since the game is bottlenecked on other things. Players seem to like it, there are some issues since the models are so small they are more prone to hallucination, and you also have to give them preset topics or they go on the same track again and again.
I haven't been able to use it for more than events since the tokens per second aren't high enough - I would like to use the models to e.g. generate actions for characters based on their history of interactions with other characters, but that ends up taking so much time that the player never gets any events.
I also did a demo of an LLM-powered NPC, I think the issue here is that you need more than just the LLM in e.g. a 3D RPG where you can actually go up and talk to the character. You can generate the text, but from there you also need to generate speech, from that you need to dynamically generate realistic facial and body animations that match up with it - this means you need 3 or 4 models chained together in a pipeline.
I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs.
Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer.
There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable.
The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.
There are enough people playing multiplayer games where this is not the case. Those are actually kind of annoying because ELO systems cause you to always loose about half the games (except if you are the top player of all the players) no matter how much better you get.
You could tune this to handicap the LLM such that the player wins 80% of the time or so and it should be more fun (except for the competitive aspect).
Thats a good point about multiplayer, I was really thinking single player only. I guess the main thrust of my point is that the reason there isn't more ML in games isn't related to performance, its that the goal of game design(single player anyway) isn't to make enemies into unbeatable gods so the usefulness of ML is somewhat limited.
I've only seen proof-of-concepts, like Vaudeville[1]. I think more work is currently done in the modding scene, for example with Mantella[2] which, "brings every NPC in Skyrim and Fallout 4 to life with AI."
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ [2] https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/
Excepting strategy games, the industry's experience has been that most players won't notice clever AI.
There have been a number of games that have tried AI conversations, but you're basically trying to sell a Chat GPT prompt, and many players are aware they don't have to pay you to get a similar result on their own.
Right until you release it and a minor gets the NPC to talk about rape or something.
Related, but we've had multiplayer for decades now.
They already bifurcate in most any tech related job posting. You have the "AI/LLM" jobs that are full on llm koolaid and pretty vague about what your role in the job even entails, and then there's the "AI/ML" jobs that are just how they are calling the same old ML jobs these days. The title could be the same between the two, but its usually obvious from the post description what the job actually is.
The number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
We need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad
Instead, we got Universal Paperclips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Which ironically is the name of a pretty amazing game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
Ah shit, here I go again. The last two hours of productivity today are toast.
Game dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.
there already tons of interesting games generated over at www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev
I think it is over
What would you say is the best example of an AI created game?
I’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.
I say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
I don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article.
Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
Why not? The code is famously convoluted and slow (see: dfhack). It's still an amazing accomplishment, but that doesn't make the code itself a challenge frontier models today aren't up to.
Why do you think this?
There is no universe in which Dwarf Fortress becomes a "cultural milestone." It's core concept and gameplay would never appeal to the mainstream.
The premise that the only thing holding it back is not using an AI seems far fetched. How much game code have you looked at? If it shipped, chances are it's a goddamn mess. People made memes about Undertale's thousand-line switch statement. But it isn't the code quality that makes a game (unless it breaks, if it works literally no one cares) but the design and intent behind it. Using an AI wouldn't result in anything as unique or as innovative as Dwarf Fortress. It would just get something forgettable and mediocre to market faster.
This seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus.
> Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
Well, that is an assumption. You have to demonstrate this claim. Right now I do not believe that claim.
> the message appears to be correct.
"in shambles because of AI" no. It's the same as it always was.
AI lets people cosplay as whatever field they are interested in. You can feel like a game developer, or doctor, or writer, or artist, and it's fun!
> now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it's replicable at scale, or that it's even producing the same quality as the product they've actually been selling.
this is happening across all industries
But will people buy it?
(Spoiler: more than you’re comfortable with, yes they will)
The article makes note about profits as high as ever, which is true for the revenues. Revenue of the industry used to grow every year until 2020, when it stalled and had been the same for the past 5 years. While revenue remains the same, the cost raises - people want more money due to inflation, benefits cost more, capital costs more etc. etc. So no, profits are not as high as ever, they had been falling steadily over the past 6 years and as the result we see all the layoffs and studio closures.
Is AI the reason? I somehow doubt that AI caused the revenue to stall in 2021. In 2021 AI could not even draw hands, least write decent code. What we had around that period was a lot of M&A in the industry. Insane capital went into buying up game studios and even publishers like Zenimax and Activision. Embracer alone acquired ~200 studios in 2019-2022. If I wanted to know why the industry is fucked up now I'd be looking there, not at the AI.
I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse.
Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else.
I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.
You may wish to check if the screen name JackWeinberg is available.
It’s been in bad shape for the last 11 years.
AI is very disruptive. I'd wish people would stop boosting Skynet.
More accurately stated, people's reactions are disruptive. The tech itself sucks and doesn't do any of the things boosters claim it does.
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are you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein
The argument that it is in shambles wasn’t particularly persuasive. “videogames are as profitable as ever”
It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
How is that any different than the market for toilet paper or ovens?
It's not, and it's the reason why nearly everything is low quality or ultra expensive.
It sounds like you're complaining about capitalism, not AI?
Shareholder capitalism as milton friedman argued for it. Ford had a different vision but the Dodge brothers stamped it out.
Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse.
And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
> The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
Is there any evidence of this claim being true?
Welcome to growthism.
Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
Yes, then this part was regulated. And so if you allow cash out, you're regulated.
The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
Profitability can only matter as long as the ecosystem is sustainable; otherwise once the floor collapses there's no more money to be made. A game can be profitable, but when the entire team that made it is laid off or furloughed before launch there isn't a team anymore to follow up. Eventually those people leave the industry and there isn't enough capital made by your average worker to fund their own gaming studio, relying on investors or the rich to parasitize their work in order to create more games.
This is part of the reason why we see endless games as a service despite 90% of them failing. Teams have to do the bidding of the rich, but the rich don't know what's 'fun'.
"the industry" also includes "human resources", previously known as personnel or humans.
Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not.
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
Money has to do with whether you can make the game. Games are regularly funded by many non-profit options such as co-ops or grants, etc. Developers are free to make games however they want.
Don’t you make more money if the game is fun to play? (People buy the game)
A huge marketing budget can push a mediocre game far further than a really good indie game that doesn't get lucky with youtube.
... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place.
We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments.
But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well.
And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores.
Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
No.
100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend.
This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes.
You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play.
Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this.
So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no.
Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
Not necessarily. Some of the most profitable games out there are not very fun to play, but they have their monetization strategy nailed down.
People laughed at Blizzard when it came out with the mobile game Diablo Immortal, and I've never heard it listed among Blizzard's best games, but Diablo Immortal was one of, if not the, best earners the company ever made.
The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job.
If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor?
The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
>Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.
I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
A sizable portion of the blue collar economy collapses too if the white collar portion stops having money to spend or suddenly has an influx of time to do some of the stuff the blue collar workers were doing for them like lawns, home repair, painting etc.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
The idea is to break the middle class. Blue or white collar it doesn’t matter. A politically active middle class is a danger to the designs of Silicon Valley ghouls.
"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI"
I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
Blue collar workers such as plumbers are in danger of being replaced by robots, but not any time soon. But by the time this happens, enough people from more vulnerable fields will have been forced out that a "solution" will have been found. The "solution" is much more likely to be dystopic than utopic though.
I'll believe that when I can get a robot plumber or electrician to come to my house for less than what a senior SWE makes per hour. Until then, it's just an empty promise.
> Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
There will just be a lot more workers competing for those blue collar and service industry jobs in the future which will drive down their wages.
The issue isn’t every other CEO having access to the “make game” button, but who will buy that game when the customers have access to their own “make game” button?
Good point. Except, the problem is that at AI prices similar to current ones, it would cost someone thousands of dollars to make the game for himself.
Luckily for us China based companies are pushing the price down and bringing it to those who can afford a decent hardware. Which might not be everyone, but enough people to make it matter.
The day AI goes good enough to work in place of a principal engineer, and 10.000 people get fired, is the day when 10.000 new 1-person companies will appear that will make you whatever software you want at a fraction of the cost the big companies want to rent it to you.
Software is becoming a true commodity. Data, Hardware, specialised knowledge, good taste and engineering practices, and connectivity. Those might be key points that might keep people on a certain infrastructure, not just the software.
Well, people often play games not because they are the best game, but because their friends are playing it and they want to join in the experience. This seems to have more to do with marketing than game or code quality, and marketing is not exactly cheap.
> The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor?
No, the problem is, no one will need the CEO. They'll press the button on their own.
Not to mention “labor they don’t understand” is only possible with specialization and modernity.
Back when everyone was a farmer, yeah sure everyone understood the job
I think that even back in early farming days, there were usually some guys who were good at using spears and didn't know much about farming who would go around taking part of the farmers' output. If the farmers were relatively lucky, the guys with the spears would stick around and defend the farmers from other guys with spears in a long-term arrangement of trading protection for material goods instead of just roaming around robbing farmers without giving anything back.
Yep.
We call the former “states” and the latter “gangs”. The difference is subtle.
It's possible to be very talented and a crank.
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